eclectic but that they are controlled by a deep philosophy; and we see them all fall ing into their due place in an orderly scheme of knowledge. Art holds its true place as the interpreter of truth, but not her guide. Science is not shunned as if it were a skeleton on wires, something unseemly in the home of the beautiful. And in her wise and far-reaching vision philosophy is the constant guide of life and knowledge. In this completeness of range and solid harmony of culture George Eliot represented to our age something of that gospel of which Goethe was the older prophet. Real culture such as hers is a far more solid thing than those airy acquirements which often usurp the name. George Eliot's culture was knowledge harmonized by artistic instinct, and deepened by an abiding moral glow. Culture is too often supposed to be attainable by fine critical taste, and a curious felicity in pirouetting around many things. To her science, philosophy, social ideals, were the substance of culture; the graceful form and the critical judgment were the instrument by which it speaks. "Her gratitude," she writes, "increases continually for the illumination contributed to her life," by one whom, strangely enough, the higher criticism pronounces after all to be "a grotesque old French pedant." But culture and criticism too often see men and things in a very different light. Just so, Bossuet saw things differently from those charming abbés of the Regency who taught belles-lettres, and many other matters, to the belles marquises of the day. On the whole we shall most of us prefer the culture of George Eliot, with its ordered scheme of knowledge, its hold on moral life and scientific philosophy, to that peripatetic culture which always finds science and philosophy too hard to understand; and which in the mean time goes hopping about, like a well-preserved Ariel, from flower to flower, and from continent to continent, as Barnum waves his magic wand. ever stood in the foremost rank of the | Turn it the other way. None of our English thinkers of the first, second, or even third rank, have resorted to romance as a vehicle of thought. The only possible exceptions that occur to me are Swift, Dr. Johnson, and Miss Martineau; but "Gulliver," "Rasselas," and "Deerbrook are romances only by courtesy for their authors. Abroad there have been examples of men of foremost intellectual force who have written novels. Of these one only Goethe-has written a true novel in a vein worthy of himself. And it is to "Wilhelm Meister" that we may most aptly go for analogues to the George After all that has been written about Eliot cycle of novels. Of course, as poet, George Eliot's place as an artist, it may as a secular force of European rank, be doubted if attention has been properly Goethe himself stands apart. But in his directed to her one unique quality. What-" Wilhelm Meister" we have those mediever be her rank amongst the creators of romance (and perhaps the tendency now is to place it too high rather than too low), there can be no doubt that she stands entirely apart and above all writers of fiction, at any rate in England, by her philosophic power and general mental calibre. No other English novelist has tations upon life, human nature, and so- ST 3 21 Then again Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot wrote prose fictions which may by a stretch of language be called novels. But the wit of "Candide," the pathos of the "Religieuse," the passion of "Héloïse" do not make up a tale fit to be placed beside" Silas Marner," as a complete gem of art in the true field of romance. Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, may take rank above George Eliot in the sum of the intellectual impulse they give to their time. But none of them, unless it be the author of the "Misérables," can be said to be her equal in the painting of real life and actual manners. perfect ease, bounding in his full suit of mail on to his charger like some paladin, and careering in it over the field as if it were a robe of tissue. But it is given only to the one or two of the greatest to interpret the profoundest thought, to embody the ripest knowledge, in the inimitable mystery of art. And thus it comes about that we so often feel the art of George Eliot to be short of perfect. The canvas of laborious culture is too often visible through the coloring of the picture. We find so much to think about that we crave a little rest for simple enjoyment. The chorus is very majestic; we are amazed by forked flashes And here we may find at once the of wisdom, sonorous gnomes, prophetic strength and the weakness of George strains worthy of the immortal trilogy; Eliot. With a mental equipment of the but the chorus is often a little slow; and first order, her principal instrument was sometimes slightly senile, goody, prolix. art. And so she played a double part- We have come to a tragedy, we know; as the most philosophic artist, or the most but we crave more business, incident, artistic philosopher in recent literature. light, and air. I confess that, for my part, It has been well said that there are flashes I feel in the George Eliot cycle something of hers which recall Pascal, Dante, Taci- of that which I am Goth enough to expetus. There are certainly some which are rience when I hear Beethoven's" Fidelio." worthy of Burke, Condorcet, or Vauve-"Fidelio " is undoubtedly one of the most nargues. There are single passages which glorious creations of modern music, with Bacon might have conceived, and others an almost matchless overture, a noble which Montaigne might have written. chorus, a high moral in its plot, and a And again there are thoughts which Cole-finale which seems heroism transfigured ridge and De Maistre have never sur into song. And yet the entire scene passed. One need not compare her in the passing in prison, the darkened stage, the sum with any of these famous thinkers. slow movement, the monotony of minor It is plain that in philosophy she has not key, to speak figuratively, the want of produced work that can weigh with theirs. contrast, color, buoyancy, fill me with a But it is the sustained commerce with certain involuntary sensation of gloom. I men like these, the continually recurring go home, purified, and thrilled by a noble sense that we are in contact with a mind work of art resounding with high moral of their order, of the same intellectual purpose - but a little lowered in nervous family, which rouses in us so intense a vitality. Something of the kind I feel delight in her novels that we are apt to when I read "Romola." indulge in hyperbolic language. For my part, I would choose "Silas Marner" as the best type. It is the complete working out of one pathetic idea in a single melody. That sustained minor key could hardly be borne through a long piece in several volumes, and the idea is one which breadth, brilliancy, variety, and movement would impair. But in a miniature such as this it produces a profound impression. It may be classed along with the "Mare au Diable," "François le Champi,” and “Eugénie Grandet;" more pure, more thoughtful than any of these, but hardly to be named beside such an immortal idyl as "The Vicar of Wakefield." But the question comes in, and it must be answered," Could she play the double part perfectly?" Did her philosophy, culture, moral earnestness, overweight her art? or was her art the complete and easy instrument for interpreting all that her brain and her soul contained? Few are now convinced that her art was always equal to so great a demand. For that reason it may be doubted whether it will ultimately take the very first rank. A few of the greatest sons of men have combined all that their age had attained with supreme creative ease. Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, and Virgil seem to use their vast intellectual power as if poetry Let us who love the art of George Eliot were their mother tongue, their natural abstain, if only in obedience to her teachorgan of thought. Alone of the moderns, ing, from all extravagance of eulogy. Goethe wields his panoply of learning with | Certain that she belongs to the foremost intellectual forces of our time, and seeing | And there is as much hard thinking and that she is a novelist (for neither poems nor essays express her genius truly), some are apt to decide that she stands in the very front rank of the artists of the modern world. That is surely to claim a great deal too much. Cervantes, Fielding, Scott, of course, stand immeasurably apart and above, by virtue of their wealth of imagination, their range of insight into manners, and sympathy with character of every type. Goldsmith, Defoe, Richardson, I think too Sterne and Lesage, stand again in another class by virtue of their consummate art in producing, in some more limited field, images of pathos, humor, naïveté, or vitality, worthy in their own sphere of the mightiest master's hand. analytic psychology in any chapter of "The Mill on the Floss or "Daniel De. ronda " as would have driven little Jane Austen silly so much as to comprehend. But these are not precisely the conditions of perfect art. Scott did not get up the Crusades when he wrote "Ivanhoe," or read articles on Cavaliers, Covenant, and so forth, when he wrote "Old Mortality." Scott was bursting with all he knew about Malignants and cropped heads; he was bursting with his story, and brimful of his characters. If you had stopped him in his ride he would have rattled on about it; and at supper with the young ones he would sing Bothwell's songs and repeat Burley's curses. Jane Austen would write little romancelets to her girl The place of George Eliot will doubtless correspondents, and she photographed her ultimately be found in the group where we partners in the midst of a ball. George set George Sand, Balzac, Jane Austen, Sand, amidst sonatas from Chopin and Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontés. Judg- songs by Madame Viardot, would pour ing her purely as artist, we can hardly out her prose lyrics as the lark empties hope that her ultimate popularity will quite her soul; and Dickens or Thackeray equal theirs. That she is immeasurably cared more for a queer name or a whimsuperior to them all as thinker, teacher, sical expression than for all the psychol inspirer of thought and purifier of soul, ogy in Kant or Hegel. will perhaps be little disputed. As facile creator of types, painter of varied charac-power, and moral seriousness, are in one ter, veracious chronicler of manners, she has not their range, vivacity, irrepressible energy. In art very much must be given to mass of impression, vividness of enjoy ment, fertility of creation. The inexhaustible charm of George Sand, the microscopic vivacity of Jane Austen, the pathetic oddities of Charles Dickens, the terrible Hogarthian pencil of Balzac and Thackeray, were all deliberately foregone by a novelist who read so deeply, who looked on life so profoundly, and who meditated so conscientiously as George Eliot. But if this knowledge, philosophic sense a weakness, closing to George Eliot the highest circle of art, in another sense they are her strength and the source of her real influence. English literature has only one weak side. It has abundant examples of almost every type of literary art. But it is curiously poor in those thoughts in which the literature of France and Greece abound; those Pensées wherein Descartes, Pascal, Vauvenargues, Vol. taire, Diderot, embodied philosophy in some memorable phrase which is worth a volume, or those golden words of wisdom — kтñμα eiç ȧεì — which Plato, Thucydides, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius made current coin forever. Now the novels of George Eliot are rich with such apophthegms wherein ripe meditations on morals and men are embodied in words of poetic concentration and beauty. These letters show us the conditions under which her genius worked, and enable us curiously to watch the limits which she so carefully set upon herself. Though she disdains to vent such wails and groans as Friedrich or the Revolution wring from the much-tried soul of Carlyle, These letters (and it is their chief interGeorge Eliot sets about a new tale with est) show us this cast of mind in its growth all the conscientious gründlichkeit which and activity. Almost every feature of the Sartor brought to his task. Just as he novels is abundantly traceable as part of pounds over the battle-fields of his hero, her daily life and mental habit. In her and wades through the Moniteur or Puri- familiar letters, in her casual reading and tan sermons, so she begins "Romola " or least serious occupation, we find that "Felix Holt" by getting up Florence and dominant tone of moral analysis, the unChartism. There are scientific similes dertone of steadfast sobriety, almost, but and moral reflections in "Middlemarch" not quite, passing into melancholy, the which a man might well spend an hour in strenuous trust in a better time to come, working out in all their connotations. | with the resolute facing of the darker problems of life. It is curious to note | nostic, in maturity she settles into a deep that the very style and phrase so familiar religious earnestness, where the evolution in the novels was part of her mental consti- of man's destiny is the inspiration and the tution. The good people who trace every-ideal. We see this grand conception of thing of well or ill in human character to man's progress towards the better entirely the degree in which one accepts or rejects possessing her soul. It colors her letters, the miracles in the Old Testament, and words, and conduct. We see it giving who ascribe what they are pleased to call her life rest, fulness, cheerfulness, and the sadness of George Eliot's novels to purpose. It nerves her with self-control her want of adequate hold on verbal in- in sickness, disappointment, and weari spiration, will be surprised to find in these ness. It gives a moral glow to her interletters that the sadness is principally visi- course with friends, to her consideration ble in her Calvinistic and Biblical period, for all who come near her, to her plans that it almost disappears from her soul for work and art. It makes her reticent, when theology had become to her a merely resigned, contented, full of merciful feelinteresting experience. So, too, the love ing, and slow to give offence or to take it. of scientific illustrations, what one might In all these letters there is not a spiteful more truly call the analogies of physical word, not an outburst of egoism, nothing and moral laws, seems to possess her more fretful, sordid, jealous, or malicious. It strongly as a girl, even than in after life is the affectionate, self-possessed, humanwhen she lived amongst men of science. izing life of a high-souled woman; devoted At the age of nineteen she perpetrated a to her art, but ever keeping room in her simile wherein her mind is likened to "a thoughts for the few whom she chose as stratum of conglomerated fragments," per- her friends. haps more complicated than any to be The letters prove, what no intelligent found in later writings (vol. i., p. 59). It reader of her books could doubt, that is obvious too that her style grows simpler George Eliot was womanly in the true as she became a great writer. There is sense of the term. She even took a curi(vol. i., p 76) a single sentence with up-ous pride in her skill in all the accomplish. wards of two hundred words in it, and ments of the housewife; and her experieighteen stops before we get to the pause. ence, which ranged from the management And a few lines farther on, there is a of a dairy farm to that of a crowded drawbeautiful but most elaborate parallel be- ing-room, was indeed unusually large. tween organic development in sociologic Her interest in the education of women and in biologic types. 'Sewing," she was not only very keen, but very practical. writes, "is my staple article of commerce She was naturally the centre of all those with the hard trader Time." And all this movements which aimed at the realization by a girl of twenty, living in a quiet farm- of women's best future. Yet of the ordihouse, in 1840, when sociology and most nary babble about women's rights we find of the other "ologies " had not been heard not a word in these volumes, not a word of! She reads book on the battles of even of disdain. It glanced off her unCondé and Turenne, and cries out, "Such | heeded. And it is noteworthy that a a conflict between individual and moral influence is no novelty." The Life enables us to answer the question, if George Eliot was a pessimist of confirmed melancholy type. Assuredly not. She was throughout life very serious, constitutionally of low animal spirits, liable to nervous depression, and with a certain unconquerable shyness. But she is not melancholy at least not after she had shaken off the cruel burden of Calvinism. Towards middle life and onwards to its end she is, as she happily said, a meliorist; facing the world with clear vision in all its evil, but confident in its progress towards the better. In all this we see the complete correspondence between her belief and her general temper. In girlhood a devout Evangelical Christian, in youth a somewhat sceptical Ag woman who in brain, in culture, in aspirations, in knowledge of the world o'ertopped all the women of her time, hardly paid the suffrage clamor the compliment of a rebuke. The publication of these letters and the witness of her husband will confirm the unmistakable impression produced by her books with respect to her religious and philosophical opinions. Obviously, as all the world could see, she formally accepted no Church and no school as an absolute adherent. At the age of twenty-two she passed gently and gradually from orthodox piety into a vague deism, which in middle life, in the attacks on Young and Cumming, developed a negative side, and at last she adopted a conscious belief in the force of humanity and its future. It is most striking that in all this history of mental progress there is no perceptible | discussion on a moral problem whereon to those whom he and she left behind. He What, it will be asked, was her general On the general law of moral duty our attitude towards Positivism? It is stated own position is clear. The cause to with entire accuracy by Mr. Cross in his which some of us have pledged our lives Life (vol. iii., p. 419): "For all Comte's (would that he and she had done so!) is writings she had a feeling of high admira- laboring in every way to fortify the mar tion, intense interest, and very deep sym- riage bond; would teach the future to pathy." Much of his system she wholly make it indissoluble by law, and indissolurefused to accept. With the Positivist ble even by death. In the chaos which movement generally she was in active re- has followed the loosening of old moral lation, and she even had contemplated a and religious canons, strange and unpoetic embodiment of Positivist aspira- wholesome doctrines are put forth in the tions (vol. iii., p. 311). But there was no name of society and moral duty; and reason to suppose that she would ever whilst opinion and religion still sanction have entered into formal communion with divorce, the unsettlement of ideas will that or any other religious body or with still be profound. But, we trust, the fuany philosophical school. It is very dif- ture will recognize that responsibility in ferent when we come to speak of her marriage and happiness in marriage alike sympathies and general tendencies. With depend on its irrevocable nature. The the cardinal ideas of Positivism-the future will know nothing of degrees of cherishing and extension of all true reli- marriage or of any honorable union but gious sentiment, and the direction of that that of the inflexible law of the land. In sentiment towards the collective well- this welter of opinion, we hesitate to judge being of mankind — not only was George the act of those who sacrifice their lives Eliot in profound sympathy, but no one to what they hold to be honor and duty. else in our time has expressed those ideas But it is the essence of marriage to be with such power. In that sense, vigor- above the field of individual exceptions, ously rejecting as she did much of Comte's to stand supreme, high beyond all persystem, and with a constitutional repug-sonal opinions, miseries, or joys. The nance for systems and codes of life, she may be said to be the greatest believer in humanity as a religious inspiration whom our country and time have produced. Throughout her novels, in "The Spanish Gypsy," in the poem on immortality there glows the idea, that in the destinies of the human race the future will find the object alike of reverence and of duty. Here one would be glad to end. But the publication of these letters has aroused happiness of individuals would be dearly A few months before her death she wrote (21 May, |